Piedmont Hospital

Serving Atlanta for more than 100 years, featuring cutting-edge technology, Piedmont Healthcare offers world-class facilities with a down-to-earth feel. These apparent dichotomies are what make Piedmont Healthcare the South's foremost healthcare provider. Our outstanding combination of hospitality and history, technology and understanding allow us to provide our community with unparalleled medical services.

Situation

Heart Failure is a debilitating and costly chronic condition. It is estimated that over 5 million cases exist in the US with over 550,000 new cases each year. This represents a tremendous burden on our healthcare system, particularly in hospital costs and resource utilization.

Solution

Using a home tele-monitoring system and protocol driven disease management services, Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta has developed a unique care delivery model for Heart Failure patients. This care delivery model supports high tech and high touch, providing the intimate care and support to help patients and their caregivers learn to self manage their disease as well as provide intense evidence based clinical care.

The telemangement system designed to be user friendly and require minimal computer knowledge, serves as a tool to patients, caregivers and physicians to monitor trends in blood pressure and weight, hallmarks in Heart Failure management. The remote nature of the devise allows for close monitoring with minimal hospital resource utilization. This combined with a comprehensive outpatient Heart Failure disease management service has demonstrated a dramatic decrease in hospital readmissions in patients in the program.

Better Health & Lower Cost

Hospital readmission 30 days after discharge for heart failure patients in the disease management program were 75 percent lower than for patients not in the program, a difference of a 1.45 percent readmission rate versus a 5.85 percent readmission rate. Both figures are significantly below the national average of 20 percent for hospital readmissions for heart failure patients 30 days after discharge.

The lower readmission rates for program patients were sustained over time, with only 3.6 percent of the program patients requiring hospitalization at 90 days post-discharge as compared to 11 percent of patients not in the program.